As a union researcher who uses participatory research methods, I was particularly interested in the chapter that discussed Maria Mies’s study of lace makers in India. Mies recruited women who were familiar with the region and the dialect to be part of her research team.
Read more →Eileen Boris’ meticulously researched and detailed book, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019, reveals some enduring challenges for women globally to actualize their full labor rights. There are three themes in the book that resonate for me as someone who works on transnational issues impacting women workers in Bangladesh and South Asia as well as low wage immigrant workers in the United States particularly in the South Asian diaspora.
Read more →Eileen Boris details the history of how the International Labor Organization (ILO) moved from positioning the male industrial worker in imperial centers to acknowledging the feminization of labor and promoting gender mainstreaming in Making the Woman Worker. She illustrates the ways that “othering” women workers led to treating women as objects instead of agents involved in their own economic justice efforts.
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As we celebrate International Women’s Day, we are pleased to host a roundtable discussion on Eileen Boris’ new book, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019. Boris’ book, centered on the International Labor Organization, the global United Nations agency that sets labor standards, offers a window to understanding gendered labor systems and the struggles to redefine them through the ILO.
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The dual enrollment programs offered to cash-strapped students and parents imposes a specific labor burden on sometimes low-paid faculty. We need a solution that doesn’t whipsaw the faculty in high schools and colleges.
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The rewriting of radical history has occupied two generations of US historians, in one way or another, and among some especially fine efforts in race-linked struggles, Red, Black and White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 by Mary Stanton is a gem.
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Our series of interviews with authors of new books in labor and working-class history continues. This month, Johns Hopkins University Press publishes Marla Miller’s new book, Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts. Miller, the director of the Public History Program and a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, answered questions from Jacob Remes.
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Our series of interviews with authors of new books in labor and working-class history continues. In this edition, Stephanie Riley interviewed Jake Altman on his new book Socialism before Sanders: The 1930s Moment from Romance to Revisionism
Jimmy Hoffa used to say he’d be forgotten ten years after his death. This was an uncharacteristically unintelligent judgment. Forty-four years after his murder on July 30, 1975, Hoffa is still famous enough that one of the most celebrated movies of 2019, The Irishman, is about the man who claims to have killed him, Frank Sheeran.
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One hundred years ago this November, a small army of federal agents, backed by police and vigilantes, launched the first of a series of incursions on radical groups that would come to be known as the Palmer Raids, after Attorney General A.
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